


a thousand dreams (within me softly burn)

by glittergothh



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Brief mention of non-consensual happenings on Kylo's part, Error 404: Ben Solo not found, F/M, I just really love to torture myself apparently, If you expected a happy ending I don't know what to tell you, Kylo is pretty dark in this so here's your warning, Lots left to the imagination here for a fic that has graphic sex in it, Pining, Really this is just angst and nothing else, Welcome to the pit of pain, but it doesn't eventuate, maybe a little bit of feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 00:42:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20267212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittergothh/pseuds/glittergothh
Summary: "As usual, his mind excels at dredging up precisely the memories that ache the most. Not for the first time, he wishes there was some way to make himself forget all of this. Erase it all, go back to whatever he was before she appeared, that blazing, unstoppable comet of a girl, and left burning handprints on his heart."





	a thousand dreams (within me softly burn)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little angst-ridden freeform oneshot that I wrote last year after a very vivid, very sad dream about Kylo and forgot about until today. It's not quite a complete AU but from what I can surmise, it takes place five years after whatever tryst Rey and Kylo had, which itself took place a while after TLJ. That's about as solid of a timeline as we're gonna get.
> 
> I'm going slightly bonkers waiting for TROS to come out, so if you are too, and you happen to be subscribed to me, here's a little something for the pain.
> 
> Oh, what, you're hurting even more now after reading this? Well, me too. Welcome to hell. 
> 
> Title shamelessly ripped from Arthur Rimbaud's 'Evening Prayer' because I'm obnoxious and stan him hardcore.

A ripple spreads through the background of his thoughts while he’s in the midst of intimidation tactics. He steps aside, letting his Knights handle the rest of the transaction while he fumbles to recapture that momentary flicker, the firefly glimpse of _her_. A trespasser in his mind. On his turf.

This planet is under strict First Order control. She would have to be either unbelievably stupid or exceptionally reckless to come here. And he knows she isn’t stupid.

Reckless, however… that’s her calling card.

Kylo Ren strides further into the marketplace, lifting one black-gloved hand to stay his knights as they start to move after him. They remain behind, their stares – even from behind metal masks – boring into the back of him as he stalks away.

He passes a colourful pastiche of market stalls – counters draped in dyed silk, selling healing crystals and tonics in neon hues – without once turning his head. His attention is held elsewhere, a curious expression twisting his scarred face: a mixture of pique, anger, and – written plainly in the slight softening of mouth and clenching of fists – longing.

His mind is a hopelessly unpickable knot, a jarring mesh of fantasies and realities: what if it was her? What if he could capture her, here and now? Would he take her back to the flagship? Torture information out of her? A stirring of excitement at the thought.

But - what if she’d come here _for _him? Deliberately? Reconsidered the offer that was made so long ago?

Unlikely, but not impossible – and not without precedent.

She had considered him worth rescuing, once.

His jaw tightens, anger at the reminder of a past he’d gladly have excised five years ago, if memories were something one could cut away like dead flesh.

He turns a corner and the back of his mind prickles, senses sharpening as he scans an empty alleyway for any suggestion of her Force footprint.

Has that changed, too? Or is it still that scintillating light?

She used to leave traces of it wherever she went, like a star trailing cosmic dust on its trajectory through space.

He clenches his fist hard enough to break bones.

\--

The first time they meet again, she’s dressed in black and he is feverish, burning up at a single glimpse. There are no words to describe wanting someone the way he wants her. His entire body _aches _with it, every beat of his disloyal heart is agonizing.

He wants her in other ways, too, darker, more selfish ways that make the worst parts of himself hard and wanting. It is made all the worse by the knowledge that she does not think of him – she must not, or the bond would have opened once in this last year.

Because that’s how it works, isn’t it? They think of eachother and suddenly they’re connected, bridged across the stars. She is never not on his mind, so it stands to reason that he is never on hers. A thought that makes him shake when he touches himself at night, thinking furiously of hunting her down and _forcing _her to submit to him, until the anger is sweated away and all that remains are less violent memories, of her skin on his and her eyes in the firelight, and he spills all over his hand, disgusted with himself.

At those gasping, post-orgasmic moments, weak and flushed, he’s almost glad the bond has lapsed into disuse.

But then he sees her, in dark clothes he’s seen only in his filthiest imaginings, and it all comes flooding back. He can’t even speak, as Hux orders the Stormtroopers to advance onto the plain where the Resistance is standing, trying to chivvy the remaining inhabitants away from their village, which will soon be burnt to soot. He sees her and stiffens, and from this far away he sees her shoulders tighten too, sensing him.

Her head turns, seeking him out. Searching for his scent on the wind, a wily fox, ready to turn tail and flee at the first opportunity.

He can’t let her escape him twice.

Hux is yelling after him as he punches the button to drop the aircraft so hard its springs break, and is still yelling when he charges down the ramp and sprints in her direction, igniting his lightsaber on the fly. He can’t hear anything over the screaming in his ears, the thump of his heart which seems to have climbed into his throat, and can’t see anything but the outline of her, her shadow a towering sprawl across the plain, as she turns to run, too.

She escapes into a gorge, but she cannot run as fast as him. He catches her in the middle, almost crashing spectacularly to the ground as he uses his last spurt of strength to seize her arm, swinging her violently around and slamming her against the cliff wall, harder than he means to.

She gasps, her Force signature lighting up with brilliant pain, and her eyes are dazed when he lifts the beam of his lightsaber to her throat, its quillions crackling and spitting, reflecting off the sweat beading her face.

‘Kylo,’ she spits, and the use of his name physically wounds him.

She used to call him Ben.

‘This is a little desperate, even for you,’ she continues, panting a little, her face twisted with contempt. ‘All the Resistance fighters in the galaxy for you to annoy, and it has to be me.’

He looks at her incredulously – after all this time, does she still not _get _it?

‘It can _only _be you,’ he tells her, and then his lightsaber is falling away from her throat to be replaced by his hands, and he’s kissing her, the way he’s wanted to since she first said his name-

Her hand flies up, slapping him upside the head, and he reels back, his hands sliding from her neck and gripping her arms instead as she tries to hit him again.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she hisses. But there’s a violent kind of thrill in her eyes.

It’s almost enough.

\--

The first time they fuck, she is beneath him. Her hands are in his hair and his are either side of her head, scrunched in the sheets as he positions himself over her and presses in. It is as if the entire universe shifts on its axis for him, a balancing act, but at the same time it feels like fucking through a forest fire. His skin, his bones, his eyelashes, _everything _is alight with this, a conflagration of need that only worsens the longer he is inside her, because he can never fully be joined with her, never get all the way _there_.

But he comes close in these little moments, when his cock slides into her cunt and she makes those little bitten-off moans in his ear, spurring him on as effectively as an electric current to the brain. It’s almost enough when he pins her wrists to the bed and holds her down so he can fuck her deeper, merciless as he drives himself further and further inside her, half-fantasizing about ripping her apart this way, half wanting to kiss her softly while he whispers things to her about how incredible she feels, how fucking beautiful she is, how he _needs _her-

And then he comes and it’s over and they’re tangled together in a mess of sticky limbs and confused feelings.

And the next morning, she’s back on her side and he’s on his, and the whole world is black and white.

\--

The first time he says he loves her, it’s by accident. It bursts out of him at an inopportune moment, not unlike his temper. He’s chased her halfway across the galaxy by this point, and he’s exhausted, in body and spirit. He can’t keep this up, this ceaseless game of cat and mouse, catching her only to have her fall through his fingers like shards of glass, cutting him deeper every time, reopening old wounds.

She ignites the blue saber and yells at him not to come any closer, that she’ll kill him if he tries, and he ignores her, stepping forward with an assurance that shouldn’t be afforded, given how many times she’s almost succeeded in killing him in the past.

‘You’re an arrogant prick, Kylo Ren,’ she exclaims, bringing her saber up to clash with his, their faces bathed in purple. ‘I really, truly loathe you.’

The consternation on her face makes him grin. ‘Do you mean that?’

‘Yes!’ she barks, even as he takes one hand off his saber hilt to brush the hardened peak of a nipple, visible through her cotton shirt.

She fights with unusual savagery that day. He has bruises for a week.

But later, when she’s dishevelled and squirming underneath him, her cheeks flushed pink, he cannot contain the outburst.

‘I love you.’

She stops moving, glistening eyes flying up to his. ‘Really?’

‘No,’ he says sarcastically. ‘You utterly repulse me. That’s why I’m-‘ he interrupts himself with a thrust to prove his point. Rey pants, then sighs.

‘Kylo,’ she says exasperatedly, rolling her hips up against him until he has to grip them, keep her still because she’s really trying to make him come right in the middle of this conversation. ‘Do you mean to imply that we’re having _hate-sex_? Because that’s an intriguing concept.’

‘Fuck, Rey, no, we’re not-‘

She cuts him off by wrapping her legs around his waist and pulling him down on top of her. Conversation becomes impossible.

After, she runs her fingers languidly through his hair, curled up next to him. ‘For what it’s worth,’ she sighs, ‘I love you, too.’

\--

With effort, Kylo pulls himself out of the reverie. As usual, his mind excels at dredging up precisely the memories that ache the most. Not for the first time, he wishes there was some way to make himself forget all of this. Erase it all, go back to whatever he was before she appeared, that blazing, unstoppable comet of a girl, and left burning handprints on his heart.

Forget the hurt, the pain of her betrayal. The _hope _that still, stubbornly, endures despite these wasted years without a word.

Forget whatever it was they almost were.

And that’s the problem.

He was her almost.

But she was his everything.

\--

Kylo Ren returns to his Knights, resigned. And later, when their command shuttle leaves the planet’s orbit, he clenches his jaw as he feels another ripple in the Force. 

He does not turn around.


End file.
